JP1 Remotes

[Fish4Fun]

I followed the link from the banner ad for the $8.99 JP1 cable here to DIYgadget.com. I couldn't find the advertised product, so I went looking through their feedback forum and found some people I know who had problems there. I also found a post from back in January bringing up the Ad here and the response was that the product has been discontinued. Advertising discontinued/permanently out-of-stock products is an attribute I associate with dishonest and untrustworthy sites. I searched ebay, and easily found the same person selling the same products. The ebay user has excellent feedback, and I see the site listed frequently here, which leaves me a bit befuddled.

There are several products this site offers that I would like to order, but I am more than a little worried about them and wondered if anyone here has dealt with them and would be willing to share their experiences.

Fish

[Nils_Ekberg]

I have ordered a number of items from him and had no trouble at all.

As usual with any vendor site use paypal whenever you can which ultimately gives you some course of action.
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Nils
Files Section
Diagnosis File Section

[The Robman]

I can totally vouch for DIYgadget.com, in fact I buy alot of the cables that I sell from them myself.

There's one important detail that you need to keep in mind when you deal with vendors in the JP1 world, and this includes myself. All of the JP1 vendors, past and present, are one-man opperations, and all of the JP1 cables and accessories offered are hand-made. Even if the vendor puts together a flashy looking web site, you should never confuse a JP1 vendor with amazon.com or buy.com, etc.

Our ability to keep items in stock is largely governed by our available free time. There have been several JP1 vendors that have come and gone before DIY, and the reason that the guys who stopped selling did so was because of a change in job or because their real job started making greater demands on them. And while the income from JP1 sales can certainly help pay the rent, nobody's getting rich here.

So, if DIY forgot to change his banner ad and it still lists an item that he no longer has in stock, cut the guy some slack. Right now, DIY is the only vendor still selling JP1 cables and accessories, Hovis has gone, Filebug has gone, Issue Resolved has been out of stock for at least 6 months and the new guy (jherrick) hasn't got started yet, so for now, DIY is the only game in town. Therefore, your only other option is to make the cable yourself using your own parts.

Sorry if this sounds like a rant, but this sort of post bugs me.
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Rob
www.hifi-remote.com
Please don't PM me with remote questions, post them in the forums so all the experts can help!

[Fish4Fun]

Rob,

I would like to apologize for ‘bugging’ you; that was certainly NOT my intent. While I am new to the JP1 interface, I am more than familiar with JTAG, SPI, TWI, ISO-7816 and a host of other communication protocols, both standard and proprietary in nature. The online community that deals with devices designed to communicate with professionally engineered electronics equipment to augment their original functionality is filled with demanding users and sparsely populated with self-motivated people with both the skills and motivation to resolve the intentionally obfuscated information requisite to produce useful in-roads into these devices. Unfortunately all too often, lurking in the shadows around people like you and the senior members of this site, are people scheming to make a ‘quick buck’ off of other’s work and generosity. It appears that in the case of JP1, this is not the case, and I apologize for assuming that this may have been the case and asking such an abrasive and irritating question.

As for DIY, if the members here have had positive experiences with him, then that is good enough for me (and what I was asking). Building this cable is not difficult, but it takes time and effort to source the components and assemble them; as I said he lists several cables that I would like to order simply because I would rather spend my time testing than assembling cables. The $13.97 for the JP1 cable is a trivial price to avoid sourcing the parts.

Fish